panarmenian.net :
Three attacks carried out in the United States on a single day-a New York bombing, a Minnesota mass stabbing and a New Jersey pipe bomb blast-were under investigation for potential terror links, AFP reports.
Authorities say there is no evidence that the attacks were coordinated but their timing in under 24 hours raises fears about security-already a major issue in the country’s deeply divisive presidential election battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Twenty-nine people were injured when a bomb exploded in New York’s upmarket Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday, September 17 night, damaging buildings, shattering glass and sending shrapnel flying across the street. A second bomb was uncovered by police four blocks away and defused safely, before being sent to the FBI in Virginia for forensic examination. Both bombs were filled with shrapnel and made with pressure cookers, flip phones, Christmas lights and explosive compound, The New York Times reported late Sunday, citing law enforcement officials.
CNN reported that officials had obtained surveillance videos showing the same man near the site of the explosion and where the undetonated device was found, according to “multiple” local and federal law enforcement sources.
Hours earlier, less than 160 kilometers south in New Jersey, a pipe bomb exploded in a trash can on the route of a Marine Corps run before the start of the race, causing no injuries but forcing its cancellation.
In the Midwest, an assailant reported to be Somali-American went on a stabbing spree in a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, injuring nine people before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer, AFP says.
U.S. authorities said the motive of all three attacks was unclear, but elected officials quickly identified them as terror-related. New York went on full alert, deploying nearly 1,000 extra state police and National Guardsmen to airports, bus terminals and subway stations as President Barack Obama arrived in the city ahead of Tuesday’s opening of the UN General Assembly. There was no claim for the bombings in Manhattan or New Jersey, but a jihadist-linked news agency, Amaq, claimed that an IS “soldier” carried out the Minnesota stabbings.
